Preserves
by awesomesen
Summary: One boy, one girl, and more bad puns then you can shake a stick at. [RxG]


_I'm not even sure where this story came from, but it smacked me upside the head (I do so love saying that) and fell out all over my keyboard. Behold the fruits of my labors (oh, the first of so many bad puns). I don't make too many promises of fluff or quality. Just that it's R/G, short, and colorful. The second terrible pun: Let's jam._**  
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**preserves

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**1. it's delicious

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A present from Rin: two crates packed full of apples and straw. Straw was nothing new, but the fruits were. Rin promised the children that they were good to eat, although Rikku had her doubts. Skin so lacquer-red couldn't really be for eating, although their smell was sweetly maddening. She held on to her apple, running her fingers over its smooth skin, polishing it redder and redder, afraid to spoil it and afraid to be disappointed.

Gippal took his apple from the crate, tossed it in the air so that it hung red against the painful blue skies, caught it neatly and took a huge bite. Juice dripped messily from the corner of his mouth. He grinned and extended the apple towards Rikku, speaking with his mouth full. "Wanna bite?"

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**2. sticky-sweet

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It was the middle of a maddening workday. Shipments were due, shipments were arriving, orders were coming and going and being placed. Gippal was starting to lose track of what was happening where, and if that was where it was supposed to be happening to start with. Nooj and Baralai often complained to him that he had no idea how hard it was to run a political group. Gippal defied either to them to be able to run a business.

He finally just took off and slumped against the stone bridge leading to the temple, needing a break. As a stress relief, Gippal thought of every swear word he knew and directed them at the temple, even the ones that had more to do with sexual history then machina. Glaring over at the temple like that, tired and hungry and running out of insults, he didn't notice Rikku until she jumped up behind him, throwing her sticky hands over his eyes. "Guess who, but do it fast cuz I'm about to fall over!" she said brightly.

He did the logical thing, which was to elbow her in the stomach to dislodge her. "You're sticky," he told her, since that had been his overwhelming impression. She nodded and stuck a finger in her mouth, sucking on it thoughtfully.

"Guess I must be. I ate about ten oranges for lunch," she said, then grinned cheekily, extending the palm of her empty hand towards him. "Wanna taste?"

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**3. beautiful day

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"There are no good yellow foods," Rikku announced one day, lying on her back in the long grass with Gippal's stomach acting as a pillow. He'd tried half-heartedly to knock her away earlier, but had resigned himself by now. Since it was just the two of them, he had no person's stomach to use as a pillow and so had to lie with his head in the dirt.

"Bananas are yellow..." Gippal had somehow been under the impression that couples talked about interesting, important stuff, a belief that he was now glad he had never shared with anyone.

"Bananas are mushy and gross and _phallic_," Rikku said. "Mangos are okay. Are they yellow?"

"Kinda... orange-yellow. How about corn?" The Calm Lands were stifling hot, although there was at least a slight breeze that rustled through the grass every once and a while. Lying like this was sort of nice, Gippal figured. All this grass around made them invisible, and the sky was a really perfect, cloudless blue.

"Corn's dry. Pineapples! Those are good!" Rikku sat up abruptly, a pointed finger announcing her happy proclamation to the skies. "They're sweet and a little tart, and they make great juice drinks! Mix 'em with alcohol and a smoothie and you have a Pina Colada! And they're yellow!"

Gippal propped himself up, too. "Glad you found something yellow you like so much," he teased.

She swiveled around and crawled towards him, climbed on him so that she was suggestively close, arms pinning him down, legs straddling his. "You," she said, her voice low and seductive, "should buy me one."

Gippal found that hilariously funny somehow, and lay back down to laugh without hitting her in the process. She pouted and then giggled a little, too, crawling back off. "Hey, Gippal?" she said, more seriously.

"Hmm?" A breeze rippled through the grasses.

"We should probably head back to the wedding party now... Yuna'll be angry when she finds out we skipped."

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**4. 緑の

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Yuna introduced everyone to the Besaid tradition of watermelon smashing. Paine especially was dubious, but Yuna insisted that it was a lot of fun. "You get a stick, and try to smash up a watermelon with it, and then everyone eats it. Oh, and you're blindfolded, so it's like a game!"

Yuna then went on to tell that she had done it all the time in her childhood, leading everyone else to picture Yuna in her summoning roles, trying to whack a watermelon with her summoning staff.

Rikku volunteered to try smashing the first watermelon. There were five in all, monstrously huge and green, standing out amid the white sands and blue surf. "This is fun?" Paine asked, again, as Yuna tied a bandana over Rikku's eyes and spun her around three times. It _was_ fun, though. Rikku staggered and waved her stick uncertainly. Yuna, Aniki, Tidus and Wakka all shouted advice, sometimes contrary advice just for fun. Paine even got into it, giving Rikku yelled directions that would, if followed, send her crashing into the water. Lulu rolled her eyes and smiled, baby Vidina sucked on a piece of apple, and Dachi helped Shinra build a sand castle. Gippal was the only silent one for a long time, until Rikku was very close to one of the watermelons.

He and Yuna both yelled advice to Rikku at the same time.

Yuna said, "That's right, you've got it! Hit it right now!"

Gippal said, "Take your top off!"

Rikku missed the watermelon by several feet.

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**5. does it have a name?

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A creamed corn soup, salmon prepared in the Kilika style with asparagus, potatoes and lots of sauce, and blueberries with cream poured all over them for dessert. It was all very good, even if the courses didn't quite match up properly, but Rikku hardly ever cooked Spiran food and Gippal wasn't stupid enough to point it out.

He'd been a little put off when she insisted on them having a romantic dinner together, honestly, although he wasn't sure if it was the "insisted" or the "romantic" that was more distressing. Gippal had no problem with eating dinner, or with eating dinner with Rikku, but what was wrong with just ordinary, not insisted on and non romantic meals?

He picked at his blueberries. She picked at hers. They didn't usually lack for conversation, and Gippal was a little worried that his, well, worrying had rubbed off on her. Rikku was hardly ever this quiet.

"It was all really good," he said hopefully.

"Do you hate me?" she said.

Until that moment, Gippal had been oblivious to the fact that words could physically wind him. "Huh?" he said, trying to figure out the millions of questions those four words had raised. "No!"

"It's just that we've been dating forever," Rikku said. "Or, we've been dating on-and-off forever."

"So?" Gippal, with a sinking feeling, was starting to get the idea he knew where this was going.

"Do you love me?" Rikku asked instead.

He probably should have stayed completely silent, or said something smooth and comforting. It was just that Gippal was unnerved and caught off guard. It wasn't that he didn't at the least really, really like her--it was just that he didn't normally put a lot of thought into that sort of thing. "Uh... well..." he said, and trailed off.

Rikku went back to picking at her dessert, her eyes clouded.

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**6. fruit's basket upset

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The fruit store was a cacophony of smells and colors. It had caught Gippal's eye because of a sign propped up in the window: _the hundred Gil gift basket_! _Buy the basket and fill it however you want with whatever you want, only one hundred Gil! _In addition to sounding very generous, it was also cheaper than most of the pre-made fruit baskets the other stores had. Rikku liked fruit. Gippal figured it would be the perfect present.

First it had been awkward. Then they had fought. Rikku was terrible at verbal fighting, absolutely terrible at it, but Gippal had lost his temper and didn't share that weakness. He had been a lot more of a jerk then he should have been, and called her some things that he, two weeks later, still felt really guilty for. And she had cried, big messy tears, and that had felt pretty low, picking on a blotchy girl.

Needless to say, they had broken up. Needless to say, a fruit basket was necessary. Gippal felt sort of silly, picking through the aisles with an empty wicker basket, like he was some sort of old lady on a shopping trip. He grabbed some apples, because he still liked to tease her about that time, when they were kids. Some oranges, some blackberries, raspberries and blueberries. He grabbed a papaya on the basis that it had an interesting name, found a small melon and wedged it next to the apples, and topped the whole thing off with a small pineapple.

"Will that be all, sir?" The shopkeeper asked, looking hopeful that Gippal wouldn't find more ways to cram fruit into the basket--the shopkeeper had obviously never made a machina, because that was all about cramming many parts into a small space.

Gippal squinted at his basket with his good eye. It was missing something. "You got anything purple?"

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**7. white christmas

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The next summer, lounging around on Besaid, Gippal was the one to cheerfully suggest watermelon smashing, so Rikku threw a coconut at his head.

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**O W A R I**  



End file.
